


Cast Away (The Lingering Smell of Roses)

by Kasasagi



Category: Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Autumn, Eddas, Legends, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:06:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kasasagi/pseuds/Kasasagi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve goes on holiday to Europe, where he meets Loki, who gives lectures on Norse mythology. An autumn rhapsody; a story clad in a haze of old poems, legends and half-remembered dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cast Away (The Lingering Smell of Roses)

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank my beta d_violetta for her hard work!

 

_Thor spoke:_

_“Shut up you wretched wight! My hammer of might,_

_Mjolnir will take away your talk._

_I will cast you into the east_

_where no one will ever see you again!”_

(The Poetic Edda)

 

A sense of horror is spreading all through his chest, creeping upon him like a layer of frost. Opening his eyelids hurts. When he manages to tear them open, the light blinds him. After blinking a couple of times he sees a white room. He is lying on a bed with crisp white sheets. There are two such beds on either of his sides. On his right side, besides a high window, there is a man with balding gray hair who appears to be asleep. The bed on his left side is empty. 

There are IV needles stuck into his arms. A hospital room, then. Seconds later, a doctor steps in the room. He might be forty or fifty and has a tanned face and oval glasses.   
  
“You’ve been very lucky,” is the first thing the doctor says. At the same moment he realizes he doesn’t know why he is here. Or just about anything that lead to the moment of his awakening. He knows one thing, though. He knows he wouldn’t be able to answer the doctor’s first question.

“What is your name?” the doctor asks.        

He doesn’t even remember his name so he shakes his head mutely. The movement is stiff and hurts his neck.  
  
“I don’t remember,” he says.

“What do you remember?” the doctor asks.

A whirlwind of images, flashes of yellow, green, silver and red are dancing in front of his eyes, making him feel nauseous and afraid. One sensation is even stronger than both nausea and fear, a familiar sensation tugging at his abdomen.

“Falling,” he says.

The doctor, who was until then watching him intently, now averts his gaze.

“They found you under the N---- Bridge. You appear to have retrograde amnesia, caused by the trauma of your fall. You- I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I need to know the truth – were you trying to commit suicide?”

A couple of things jump into his brain at once.

“Killing oneself is an act of cowardice,” an echo of a stern voice says. Then there is pain, a lot of it, he feels flayed and burned alive. _I wish I could just end this, but I know it’s impossible-_

He blinks, realizing that the doctor is still waiting for his reply.

“I don’t know,” he answers truthfully.

  
 …

 

It is the end of June, and there has been no need for the Avengers to assemble for quite some time. Everyone is absorbed in individual missions or personal projects; everyone except Steve.

Even after all that time, Fury seems reluctant to send him on a solo mission. When Steve confronts him about that, he is told that his tests still aren’t satisfying enough. Steve doesn’t need to ask what tests Fury has in mind; he knows his physicals almost equal Thor’s. It is the psychological tests that leaves Fury worried (and might worry the other Avengers, too, if they ever got their hands on his results). He should have tried to fake them, Steve supposes, but his conscience wouldn’t let him do that.

As for personal projects, he simply doesn’t have any. He has his art, but that doesn’t really take that much of his time. At first, he thought he would try to paint everyone he remembered so freshly in his mind, but it was too painful, especially when he succeeded in capturing something – like the quirk of Peggy’s lips when she wanted to stifle her smile but couldn’t, or the way Bucky’s hands would move when he was impassionedly talking about something – and what was the point if not to capture these things, lost forever except for the images in his mind? He then tried to paint the New York of now, and that went better, but still he caught himself juxtaposing the modern image with that of the past and wondering at the seventy years that just _disappeared,_ and feeling wistful for that. 

He didn’t tell anyone about this. He has learned to use most of modern technology, learned as much of the history that had passed in his absence as he could. He tried to watch as many popular movies as he could stand, if only for the references, because he found many of them distasteful or stupid. He tries not to use slang words from decades ago, but he can’t bring himself to use the modern slang either, because it is just wrong, making him feel like a dancing monkey.  
  
So Steve uses almost no slang at all, and he thinks he sounds like a foreigner, who learned English from a textbook. This thought makes him just a little bit sad; but he is a leader so he should strive for perfection, and not be a laughing stock in any way, so he doesn’t ask _what’s cooking_ and doesn’t proclaim a perfectly made steak a _killer-diller_ and never ever threatens to _blow a fuse_ – that was a favorite of his dad’s, “Don’t provoke me, or I’ll blow my fuse!” But last time he had heard this from Joseph Rogers was a couple of days before he died in June 1929, 83 years ago.   
  
Steve tries to stop doing the math in his head all the time when they are not fighting (and all his thoughts not related to the battle at hand thankfully disappear).  

Steve really, really tries to belong.    

“You ever been to Europe?” Tony asks him. Tonight, Steve is joining him and Bruce for a drink in Tony’s bar, although alcohol has no effect on his body (and oh, how he sometimes whishes otherwise).  

Steve has to restrain himself from shaking his head in disbelief. Most of the time Tony acts like he knows everything about everyone, to Steve’s irritation and sometimes amusement. So why is he asking him such asinine questions?

“Of course,” Steve replies, keeping his tone neutral. “I’ve spent some time in Germany.”

“Yeah, I know, in the war,” Tony says with an impatient flick of his hand. “What I meant was more in the lines of travelling. Climbing the Eiffel tower while drunk on Champagne, eating Camembert and making out with hot chicks. Or guys, you know what the French are like,” Tony ends his colorful description with a wink and toasts Steve with his half-drank whisky glass.  

Steve makes a non-committal sound at that, thinking that this conversation is taking a rather uncomfortable direction.

“So, no Paris for you?” Tony assumes from his lack of reaction.

“No, it’s not really a city of my choice. Too…flashy,” Steve admits, sipping on his own drink.

“What about Moscow?” Tony keeps on.

“Too cold,” Steve says with a slightly forced smile.

“Madrid, then.”

“Noisy.”

“Now aren’t we picky, Captain,” Tony shakes his head in amusement.

“Trust me, any of those are better than Bombay,” Bruce joins in, “especially the traffic is a nightmare. I once saw a bus driver holding a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone in another, driving with his stomach. And it was a school bus, I tell you, school bus!”

Even Tony whistles in amazement.

From there, the conversation mysteriously strays to some other topic that has to do with astrophysics and Steve thinks that the issue of travelling is closed.

Except that it isn’t. A couple days later, when the Avengers throw him a birthday party (and he is very thankful for the fact that it is a small, private affair) and Tony hands him a simple grey envelope, the memory of this conversation comes back to Steve when he opens it.

 _Three week trip to Europe to the place of your choice, all charges included_ , the gift card proclaims.

 _You’re trying to get rid of me,_ is Steve’s first thought. And though he immediately chases this thought away, replacing it with, _they’re just trying to be nice, make me happy_ , the bitter taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away.

He gives his team a big smile, as sincere as he could make it. 

“Thanks everybody, this is a real kill-a _great_ gift. I appreciate it.”

  
....

 

It’s 6th October, and Loki kills a flour moth on his arm. Squishes it, really. It doesn’t make any sound. One of its legs still twitches in the brown smudge that is left on his skin. On his bare skin. There are such stains on the ceiling, and on the walls, and on various items in his pantry. He tried to get rid of them, when he first came – no, when he returned. The food was months old. He was afraid to open the fridge – and this fear proved to be accurate. Also, when he turned on his laptop, it asked him for thirty-two updates, and there weren’t any files changed in the last month. Something didn’t add up. He had been gone for six days, but everything in his apartment indicated it was much longer.

His apartment is a patch of cramped space with high ceilings and drafty windows, next to one of which a family of common swifts have made a nest for themselves. The swifts like to fly around his window at insane speed, emitting a sound that is a cross between a siren and a dentist drill. Sometimes they wake him up at night.  
  
When he told Anna at work, she gave him a kind smile, with wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, and said that he had told her _before_ , and she had advised him to invest in a pair of earplugs. He was horrified at the idea of repeating himself unknowingly, hundreds of times a day, and most of these times others were too polite to say something like Anna just did, and he realizes that he hates repeating himself. Which is rather unfortunate, given his profession.  
  
His eyes trace the brown smudge on his forearm, and he vaguely muses that he should remove it with a napkin, but dismisses it. He is too tired to move; that happens to him a lot these days. Going to kitchen or bathroom seems like a long journey, and the prospect of leaving his apartment except for work is simply too daunting to even contemplate. The stain stays where it is.  
  
First, he got rid of all the food he found, throwing away even canned soups. But the moths came back, must have crawled from cracks in the walls painted sickly green, from empty spaces between the old worn floorboards. He killed them with shoes and scrubbed the bodies away. He had been careful not to stain the walls, trying to make them sit on the furniture or kill them between two of his shoes. But there were too many of them, and he grew tired. He started killing them directly on walls and ceiling. Then he stopped cleaning the stains they left. Started to catch them with his bare hands. Stopped washing the hands afterward.

All because of all the memories he could gain, he only ever remembers her.  
  
 _Magdalena._

She comes to him at nights, before one of the swifts wakes him again. She comes to him wearing nothing but her smile, calling his name, touching his hair. She comes to him with brown loving eyes and he raises his hand to caress her, but her face crumbles away and he screams and wakes up with empty hands, or with his hands full of cotton sheets twisted between his fingers.

 _Magda. Or Lena._ He can’t remember which pet name he called her, it surely couldn’t be both, and it frustrates him that he would never know, because it is not something he can ask anyone, not her parents – they invited him over, not blaming him for anything, but he can’t imagine meeting their eyes – nor anyone else.  
  
His eyes once more find the brown smudge on his forearm, and then he closes them, feeling even weaker. _Der burde have været_ _Roser_ , he thinks, _there should have been roses._ A swift flies past his window, where the sun has begun to set, painting the fluffy clouds with reddish hue. None of this light reaches his dark, dank bedroom. Then there is a knock at his door.      

  
…

 

It’s 17th September, and Steve is unpacking his luggage in a nice and clean hotel room. The bed sheets are white and crisp and he inhales a faint odor of lavender. He puts his shirts and jackets on hangers, the rest of his clothes on shelves in the wardrobe. He arranges his sketchbook and crayons on the table. It is past sunset. He eats his dinner in a small, quiet dining hall, together with an elderly German couple who don’t speak a word of English, which is fine by him. He understands just enough of their language to deduce that they are bickering about tomorrow’s plans, not really arguing but not exchanging pleasantries either, and Steve has the feeling that this is the way they talk all the time. He chews on his little carrots and vaguely muses about what would his parents be like if they have lived enough to grow old, and realizes that even had they lived that long, he still wouldn’t be there to find out.

The German pair leaves. The dining hall grows so quiet that Steve loses the appetite to finish his dessert, and instead leaves to take a walk outside the hotel. The hotel is located near the center, but in a relatively serene street lit by dim yellow light of finely wrought street lamps. He passes only one open bar from which some muffled music can be heard and there is no one in sight in the direction where he is going, which is the silvery ribbon of the river ahead of him.      
  
As he is nearing the river, it is getting chilly, so he turns his coat closer to his body. When he reaches it, he leans against the railing and looks at the moon that is swimming in a haze, and he thinks about the book Pepper gave him to read on the plane, a collection of legends and folk stories about this town.  

There was the usual fare of undecayed saints, buried treasures and people turned into gargoyles, but there were also a few quite distinctive stories that stuck in Steve’s memory. One of them included a poor widow in the time of plague, whose children died one by one, from the oldest to the youngest. She let ring smaller and smaller bells in the town glockenspiel as their death knells, until all the children were gone and she lay down with the plague herself, thinking that there was no one left to ring a bell for her, but when she died, all the bells of the glockenspiel sounded at once.

Another took place in the time of the Swedish invasion during the Thirty Year’s War, and told a tale of an ungodly Swedish soldier trying to rob a grave of a priest, who fell into the grave while doing so, and the lid shut behind him. When the grave was reopened some years later, two skeletons were found there in a macabre embrace: skeleton of the priest held a deadly grip on the neck of skeleton of the grave robber.               
  
But the one that left the deepest impression on Steve, even on a board of his plane, which was a decidedly unromantic setting, was this:  
  
One night, there was a knock at a poor mason’s door. A masked man came to offer him a job well-paid, but he didn’t want to divulge any details, only saying that it was very urgent and should be done that very night. The mason, whose whole family was hungry, agreed and followed the man into his carriage, where two more masked men were waiting for them. They had the mason’s eyes covered by a cloth.  
  
The mason tried to guess where they were going, but it seemed that the carriage was going in circles on purpose, to confuse him. Finally they stopped and took him into some house, and descended down the stairs into its dungeon. Only there did they remove the cloth from his eyes, and he saw more masked men with lighted candles, standing next to a niche in the wall.  
  
“Do the job for which I hired you!” the mason’s guide ordered, pointing his finger at the niche, next to which there was a pile of bricks and a bucket of mortar.  
  
But the mason paled and started to shake, because in the niche there was a beautiful bound woman with a muzzle in her mouth so she wouldn’t call for help, who was emitting painful keening sounds, and her eyes were full of desperate pleas.  
  
“What is it that I am to do?” the mason asked the masked men with an unsteady voice.  
  
“Immure this person. If you don’t do as we tell you, you’ll lose your own life.”  
  
The mason didn’t see any way out of this situation, and obeyed, while trying not to look into the woman’s eyes. The men paid him handsomely, and returned him to his home, with his eyes once again covered.

The next day the mason hastened to report the last night happenings to the town hall, but neither the masked men, nor the bound and muzzled woman, nor the house was ever found.  
  
Who were those masked men, and the bound woman? What had she done to deserve such a fate? Steve doesn’t know, as the legend ends there, in a disquieting mystery.   
  
He looks at the lights from the opposing bank, floating on the dark water surface like will o’ wisps in his mother’s bedtime stories, and finds himself in a strange mood, with something in him wanting to merge with the mist and disappear forever, maybe becoming a legend, too.

…

  
 _Rachmaninoff is hard_ , Professor Anna Hoeg thinks on 28th August, _and he certainly did have big hands_. Professor Anna Hoeg is not the first person to suspect the famous composer of this biological anomaly. It crossed the minds of many piano players before her, and inspired one comedy duo to a skit, where a pianist’s assistant hands him pieces of wood carved in such way so they would press the keys in the most difficult chords.  
  
Professor Anna Hoeg has no such assistant, and her small hands struggle to press all the keys that form the chords in the middle part of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor. The little finger of her right hand feels like it’s going to pop out of its joint sooner than it reaches soprano F sharp, but she is almost there. _Just a little further,_ she thinks and moves her wrist just so, and then the phone rings.  
  
Rachmaninoff rubs at her legs insistently as she answers the phone, but she ignores him.   
  
“Professor Hoeg? This is Doctor Kupka from the V------ Hospital,” a man’s voice says and Anna’s heart starts to beat faster. Has something happened to Niels (her husband), Kirsten (her daughter)? Has there been a traffic accident? A terrorist attack? A thousand of catastrophic possibilities flashes through he mind in the second it takes her to say:  
  
“Yes, this is Hoeg speaking. What happened?”

“We have hospitalized Mr. Eric Lund. I apologize I’m calling you, but we were unable to find out anything about his family, only about his work. The university gave us this number – I’m really sorry for intruding. I understand he’s your subordinate?”

“He’s from my department, yes. What happened to Eric?” Anna asks anxiously, a quick moment of relief that her family isn’t in danger replaced with a new wave of concern.

“There has been an accident. Mr. Lund has been injured, but he is stable and out of danger. I can’t really tell you more, as you are not a member of his family-“

“He has no family,” Anna interrupts. “His mother passed away and his father is in the last stage of Alzheimer’s disease. He never spoke of other relatives.”  
  
“And what about a partner, friends?”   

“I- I am afraid that I’m his closest friend,” Anna says quietly, surprising herself at the moment. There is a brief silence at the other end of the line.  
  
“Then you should come here as soon as you can. Your friend has retrograde amnesia. He doesn’t remember his name, or anything else about himself. He needs someone to tell him all that.”  

Anna asks for address and then hangs up. She dresses herself, while Rachmaninoff the cat watches her silently. “I’m going to see Eric in the hospital,” she says to him, scratching him behind his ears, and leaves.  
  
Anna takes a taxi, which is not something she does often. They are expensive and get stuck in traffic jam. But she couldn’t imagine herself calmly waiting for a bus, while Eric is lying at the hospital feeling desperate about his lack of identity.  
  
Now she is inside the taxi and the hip-hop melody – if you can call it that – the radio is playing mercilessly drives away the scarce bits of Rachmaninoff left in her head. “Can you turn that down?” she asks and the driver complies. Thankfully, he remains silent, not like the drivers in India who always try to engage you in a conversation. Blissful silence – now she can think about Eric. The poor boy has been through so much since he came here! First his mother died, then his father became ill, and then that horrible thing with Magdalena… They are crossing the river now, and Anna Hoeg looks outside to see if there are any boats today, out of habit. There are two, but she doesn’t really see them, instead she sees Magdalena’s entrance exam and remembers that they were all laughing at something, and there was a vase of roses behind her, freshly cut, and then an older Magdalena was making her tea, putting two lumps of sugar into her blue mug, and she said, Eric is not going to New York, and Anna asked why not, and is it something to do with the Jacobsen?  
  
The tea was too hot, and Anna burned her lip. Of course not, Magdalena said, he’s not like that. But of course it had everything to do with the Jacobsen, namely with the fact that Magdalena received the grant and Eric didn’t. And Eric was exactly _like that_ : he couldn’t accompany her to New York and face the supposed humiliation. That the grant was named after the author he was researching (and Magdalena wasn’t) only deepened the irony. He wished Magdalena her success; but he wouldn’t stand beside her like a straw figure with painted smile.  
  
Magdalena understood. She dutifully repeated to Anna what he told her: his father asked to visit him on his mother's death anniversary. His father, he said! His father who couldn’t even remember his own son’s name! Anna would laugh, if it wasn’t so sad. That Eric would result to such a pathetic lie to save his pride... because it was all about his pride, it wasn’t like anything terrible happened. He was still very young. This didn’t mean a thing, he must have realized that. _Men,_ Anna sighed. Their vanity and pride. Their fragility.  
  
 _“I heard New York in spring is quite nice. You can enjoy a little bit of freedom, eh_?” She said to Magdalena then, and these words later came back to haunt her, when, in her living room full of mahogany furniture and Meissen porcelain, she watched buildings collapse and people scream.  
  
Magdalena was sent to her homeland in a zinc coffin.  
  
 _Magdalena was sent to her homeland in a zinc coffin_ , Anna tries to say with her inner voice, tastes those words. It feels like a sentence from a newspaper we have seen so many times that it lost all ties to reality. Yet it is exactly what happened to Magdalena.  
  
At the university, there was an obituary notice with her name on the board next to the main staircase, and Magdalena in the small black and white picture was smiling, and this smile didn’t match the contents of the notice. Suddenly the picture changes and it is Eric, Eric with his hollow eyes and high cheekbones and a sad little smile that draws shadows around his mouth.  
  
Anna chases the vision away – it brings bad luck, and the doctor did say that Eric was out of danger! – but she can’t shake a certain feeling about Eric, a feeling of something not quite wrong, but misplaced. For a moment she thinks she can smell freshly cut roses and there is a memory she can’t grasp. It’s like when she was a small girl, trying to catch a neighbor’s hen that found her way into their garden.  
  
“They’re repairing the T------ Street, again. I swear they do it every summer. We have to drive around,” the driver breaks the silence. The hen flew away; yes, they can fly although some people don’t know that. Some people also think that chickens have four legs.

 

…

  
  
The doctor told him that he should feel lucky, and believe in guardian angels. That by every law of nature his spine should be broken and his skull shattered. That if any religious group knew what happened to him, they would proclaim him a miracle.   
  
Loki doesn’t feel especially lucky. He feels sore and confused, as he is watching the face staring back to him from a handheld mirror. It is face of a Caucasian male, between twenty five and thirty five years of age, with deep-set green eyes, high cheekbones and unhappy mouth, framed by longish dark hair. He doesn’t feel like the owner of this face; he feels like a spectator, like someone who passed this man on the street.  
  
The doctor, who left for a while, returns with a small woman in her fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a red overcoat.  
  
The doctor speaks first:  
  
“Mr. Lund, this is Professor Anna Hoeg, your colleague. She should explain what you need to know, before your memory returns to you.” He gives them both a nod and leaves.  
  
Anna Hoeg takes a hesitant step toward his bed, and clutches her hands, watching him with concern written in the lines of her face.      
  
“What were you thinking, Eric?” she whispers.     

Loki shrugs his shoulders. This movement, too, isn’t exactly painless.

“I don’t remember,” he repeats what is quickly becoming his mantra.  
  
Anna raises a hand to her mouth, ashamed of herself.

“Of course you don’t. I’m sorry, that was inconsiderate of me,” she apologizes and makes two more steps, so she is at his bed. She sits on the edge of mattress and slightly touches his wrist.

Then slowly, in carefully chosen words, she starts to tell Loki who he is. Or rather, who is Eric Lund.

  
…  
               

Steve woke up early on Wednesday 2nd October, and saw the Cathedral he wanted to visit soon after it opened, so it wasn’t crowded yet. It was quite magnificent – he really liked the stained glass windows, and the catacombs, where he could feel the strange weight of a thousand-year history that made his seventy lost years seem refreshingly insignificant.

He was now descending from the Old Castle Stairs, passing beggars, street musicians and painters. He, too, has a sketchbook in his backpack, but none of the beautiful sights he’s seen today made him want to use it. He’s always preferred figures to buildings in his drawings.  
  
He comes to the bottom of the stair, passes the street vendors offering mulled wine and hot corn. The smell is rather inviting and Steve is tempted. It’s half past nine, but the morning is still a bit chilly. There is a faint mist floating above the river. Steve doesn’t buy any wine, because his bladder already feels full, but he does buy a stalk of corn and eats it while heading towards the river. He decides to cross it.  
  
He doesn’t use the famous C----- Bridge like he did yesterday, because it was swarming with so many people he was afraid it would break, and instead goes straight ahead to the non-famous, ordinary bridge that is used by trams and cars, but there are sidewalks, too. Steve walks on the right side, and watches the sunlight glitter in the mist. The morning is quite beautiful, only spoiled by the growing pressure on his bladder.   
  
Steve reaches the other bank, and crosses a busy road. He finds himself in front of rather drab-looking 18th or 19th century building – for an artist, Steve doesn’t really know that much about architecture, not enough to correctly identify the building’s style in any rate, but curiously enough, he remembers that the porch with a row of columns in the front is called a _peristyle_.  
  
The plate on the wall informs him he stands in front of Faculty of Arts of C----- University. Steve hurries to enter the building in happy anticipation. As uplifting it would be to say that Steve is pleased at the prospect of exploring a place of education, it would also be a lie, because Steve is pleased at the prospect of free toilets. There are many things Steve likes about this city; toilets are not among them. The public toilets are expensive, unclean and few and far between, an unpleasant incongruity with a poetic atmosphere of the place.

He decides to take a tour through the building afterwards, since he’s already here, but is quite disappointed. The insides of the building are about as exciting as its exterior, which isn’t much. The décor looks cheap and worn, while the underground library is new and sterile, making him want to revisit the Jefferson’s Library in DC, which he visited once as a child on a field trip, and it charmed him like a fairytale castle. The students he passes look happy enough though, so he supposes that’s alright. After all, this is not a sightseeing spot, but a place of education.  
  
He suddenly wishes he could attend a lecture; those should be public, right? He asks at the entrance if there are any lectures in English. The elderly gatekeeper shakes his head at first, but then lifts his finger in a halting gesture.  
  
“There’s Dr. Lund’s lecture on Norse mythology in 300, but that would be ending in-“ the man looks at the clock at his table- “fifteen minutes or so.”  
  
Steve says his thanks and heads to the third floor. He knows it is rude to come to the last fifteen minutes, but his interest has been piqued. _Norse mythology?_ His mind conjures him images of Thor standing next to him with his hammer, and Loki in golden armor and horned helmet, laughing maniacally. Of course it would not be like that. It would be old poetry and dusty tomes and boring historical facts. He imagines Doctor Lund as someone in his sixties, with elbow patches on his brown suede jacket.   
  
Steve doesn’t knock when he enters the lecture room, and the professor, who is in the moment writing something on the blackboard, doesn’t spare him a glance. Steve distantly realizes that the professor neither wears a brown suede jacket, nor is he in his sixties, but his attention is captured by the view outside the row of windows on the left wall, which forms a sharp contrast to the gray and dusty interior of the lecture room.  

The mist has risen; the Castle is bathed in a gentle glow, the sky above it is incredibly blue and next to it there is a balloon with red and white stripes, floating above the shining ribbon of the river with indescribable lightness that makes Steve’s heart soar and ache at the same time.

The professor turns to his audience, explaining something, and Steve makes a discovery which would have shocked him much more, if he hadn’t been so amazed by the tableau outside: Norse mythology on this university is apparently taught by a Norse god.

 

…

  
  
 _Ljóðaháttr,_ Loki writes on the blackboard, the last of the three meters that are to be found in Eddaic poems, together with _fornyrðislag_ and _málaháttr._ When he is writing “h” in _ljóðaháttr,_ he hears the door open. His lecture was nearing the end – why bother to come now? Maybe someone came earlier for the following lecture and didn’t want to wait outside?

Loki turns to his audience, and sees a tall man with broad shoulders in a leather jacket, checkered shirt and light brown slacks, who holds himself with a primness that screams military, and definitely isn’t one of his students. Stranger still is his demeanor – he doesn’t say anything or sit down, he just stands frozen staring out of the window as though he sees a ghost.  
  
Loki looks out of the window himself; it is a rather beautiful view, but hardly warrants such a reaction. _A wandering madman,_ Loki thinks, _how appropriate._ He chooses to ignore the stranger as he addresses the class:

“Poems in this meter typically contain six lines or two units of three lines each. The first two lines in each unit are connected by alliteration, and the third is also decorated with alliteration. The first two lines have at least two beats and the third three beats. For example,” Loki draws a deep breath, “long er nótt, long er önnur, hvé mega ek þreyja þrjár?“  
  
Loki pauses for a moment and notices there is an eerie quietness in the room, bereft of all usual sounds of student activity. He noticed this earlier, on other occasion he recited something in Old Norse. He sees that the strange man has found himself a seat, and is listening to him with the same quiet attention as his students. But something in his face gives him away; there are still traces of rapture, but it is now mixed with something that looks like incredulity. Also, Loki realizes that this face seems vaguely familiar, but he cannot place where he has seen the man before. He is sure it wasn’t at the school, though.

_Most peculiar._

“Can someone translate this?” Loki asks the audience and immediately there are a couple of hands in the air. It is, after all, a well-known example. He points at a boy with ginger hair and freckles.  
   
“Long is one night, long is the next; how can I bear three?” the student recites, rather exaggerating the pathos, but Loki nods in approval anyway. He explains some more about Eddaic meters and wants to move to kennings, but at that moment the school bell rings. He dismisses the students and starts to collect his papers. He hears the steps of someone approaching him from behind. He doesn’t need to turn to see who it is.  
  
“How can I help you?” he inquires politely, turning to face the stranger.  
  
The stranger doesn’t reply, and instead compliments on his lecture. His words feel surprisingly sincere, given that he only came towards the end of it. Loki nods in thanks and silence stretches between them. They are the only people left in this room, which now seems so big that it dwarfs them, even the stranger – _American,_ Loki surmises from his accent – who is a rather large man. The silence is not awkward, but anticipatory, full of lingering questions. Loki voices one of them:  
  
“Have we met before?”  
  
The American briefly hesitates before replying: “No, I don’t think so. But you might have seen me in the media. My name is Steve Rogers, but I’m mostly known as Captain America.”  
  
“Oh,” Loki breathes out. That certainly explained the man’s interest in Norse mythology, as he was one of those who fought off an alien invasion lead by someone who proclaimed himself a Norse god. Now, that was a delusion of grandeur if he ever saw one. And the choice of deity was inappropriate, too – Loki was a god of mischief, master of lies, hidden behind smoke and mirrors, not a god of open warfare in Hollywood style.     
  
 _I shall go into Ægir’s hall, for the feast I fain would see,_ Loki starts to recite Eddaic verses in his head to save himself from those memories that threaten to overwhelm him again, triggered by such an obvious reminder, from Magdalena’s smile crumbling before his eyes, from sickly smell of roses, _bale and hatred I bring to the Gods, and their mead with venom I mix._  
  
“I beg your pardon?” a deep male voice says, and Loki realizes that the man known as Captain America is still there and that he said the last verse aloud.

“I have a class to teach, so if you’ll excuse me,” he says tersely and leaves without looking back once. It is a lie, as he has no more classes or lectures today, but he needed to get away from this American who has left him so disquieted. What right did he have to step into one of his lectures and remind him of what he lost?  
  
He enters the Scandinavian department to collect the rest of his things, barely sparing Anna a glance – but even a short glimpse of the blue mug in her hands evokes more images of Magdalena making tea, and why can he still smell those flowers in here? He thought he got rid of all of them.  
  
Mumbling a short goodbye, he walks out of the office and down the main staircase, passing students in colorful clothes, who smile or talk or look lost in their thoughts, with one purpose or another, until he reaches the bottom of the stairs and the notice board appears on his left hand.  
  
When he first came here after his return from the hospital, he thought he caught a glimpse of something strange, something that shouldn’t be there. He came closer and read the obituary notice of Ervin Jahn, professor of Egyptian archeology, aged eighty-two, who has passed away quietly after a long ailment, and will be sorely missed by his loving wife, children and grandchildren.  
  
 _Ervin Jahn_. From a certain distance, it looked exactly like Eric Lund.  
  
Loki steps outside the building into the porch, where he is immediately assaulted by sunlight and smell of gasoline and cigarette smoke. There are many signs encouraging smokers to kindly refrain from indulging their love for nicotine on the porch, but the students and professors alike find the porch irresistible. Loki lights his own cigarette and waits for the green light. As he crosses the busy road, his thoughts once again return to the American. He heard that the man spent seventy years trapped under the ice. Well, that would certainly explain his strange behavior during today’s lecture.

 _Captain America. What a pretentious title_ , he snorts. But then he realizes that the man didn’t say “ _I am_ Captain America”; no, he said “I am Steve Rogers, _known_ as Captain America.” And the way he said it, as though he was ashamed of it! This name, this title, it obviously wasn’t something he chose for himself, but what others called him, whether he liked it not.

He thinks about the way this man looked at him, and something feels off. He realizes not only that he, Loki found the man familiar – which could be explained by media notoriety, really – but that it seemed to go both ways. And although Loki remembers only flashes of his life before his accident, he can’t imagine a plausible scenario under which he could meet this man.

And for this very reason, Steve Rogers looks as though he could somehow bring a little amount of sense into the broken mechanism that was now Loki’s life, some sense into that meaningless sea of loss and not remembering and confused, incongruous images.

Loki suddenly wishes he could talk to Steve Rogers again, yet dreads meeting him again at the same time.

  
...

 

Steve is sitting on a bench hidden by the turn of the staircase, waiting. From his position, he can see everyone who leaves the building, because the entrance he used before forms the only exit. He is determined to wait as long as it takes for Loki to reappear.  
  
He should call Fury, Tony, anyone and tell them about this, tell them that Loki wasn’t in chains in Asgardian prison, but here in this old European city teaching Norse mythology under false name, either not remembering who he is, or pretending not to so skillfully, that “god of lies” would be a well-deserved title indeed. It sounds incredibly absurd, but that’s not what is stopping Steve from reaching for his phone. He feels that if he did it, he would lose something irreplaceable and some doors would be forever closed to him.  
  
Steve doesn’t have to wait long, as Loki descends from the stairs some fifteen minutes later. So the class was just an excuse to get away from him, Steve thinks as he discreetly follows Loki outside and watches him light a cigarette. It probably was all an act, and he really should inform someone.  
  
Steve mixes in the crowd waiting to cross the street, his eyes never leaving Loki. He is heading towards the bridge Steve used to come here an hour ago. The balloon with white and red stripes Steve admired from the lecture room is still floating on the horizon, above the countless church spires. Steve hides behind a group of Italian tourists and follows.      

He keeps his eyes fixed to Loki’s figure in front of him, and remembers how he looked with a muzzle, his eyes poisonous green and accusing, and he also remembers the bound woman disappearing behind the wall.  
  
Steve makes a decision.     
  
If he called someone, he would never know what happened to her.    
  
Or worse, he would find that someone made the whole story up.      

  
…

  
Loki thinks of Jens Peter Jacobsen as he leaves the bustling street for a less frequented public garden. He wrote his dissertation on this author, and it was the first thing he read after he returned from the hospital. Jens Peter Jacobsen was a writer, whose poignant, lyrical style influenced authors as different as Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke and D. H. Lawrence. He was an atheist who translated Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ into Danish. He was also a botanist and contracted tuberculosis while collecting plants, dying from it at the age of 38. He had a young, melancholic face, cut by a triangular mustache that looked like a clothes hanger, and made Loki think of moths.     
  
Following the plan he used for the same course last year, he gave the students of his Modern Danish Literature I the task of reading Jacobsen’s novel _Mogens._ He read what he wrote about the novel in his own dissertation, but he needs to reread the story itself, to get the feel of it.   

Loki buys a coffee-to-go and enters the V------- Garden. The idea of returning to his apartment doesn’t appeal to him; he prefers to enjoy a bit of fresh air.  He walks through the eastern part of the garden where there is a square pond with a small island in the middle hosting a statue of a club-wielding, bearded Grecian god whose name he has never bothered to learn, but a group of tourist pressing in front of the pond seems eager to do so.  

He reaches the less frequented western part with hornbeams and freely roaming peacocks, where he finds a free bench in the sun. For a moment he just closes his eyes and let the sunlight caress his face. Then he opens a small volume in a crisp violet binding and starts to read.

It appears to be a story of young love of the shy, troubled hero named Mogens and a lively, carefree girl Camilla. Mogens is slowly lured out of his self-imposed solitude by Camilla, starts to truly enjoy his life, but then one night his beloved’s house catches fire and Mogens is unable to save her.

The parallel to Loki’s own situation is frightening and he shuts the book without finishing the story and leaves the park, just wanting to go home. 

He boards the tram number 22 which will take him halfway to his home, before he needs to change trams at C----- Square. At this time of day, it is only halfway full, mostly with the elderly and tourists. Loki sits on a single seat in the middle of the first car, and looks out of the window.    
  
The tram takes a sharp turn to the right and passes two ministries and the academy of science before it goes under an arch tightly squeezed between two old buildings. It goes slightly uphill on an irregularly-shaped square with a couple of churches and an ornate sundial on one of the houses, where it stops and a large group of Japanese tourists get in. It passes more churches and fin-de-siècle styled restaurants before it reaches the river and crosses it through a bridge surrounded by sophisticated Art Nouveau streetlamps and linden trees sprouting from the small island underneath.  
  
It passes the majestic building of the National Theatre with statues of the Muses and golden roof shining in the sun and takes a right turn to one of the central streets, which is full of construction machinery. On the left side there is a deep pit that will become a new subway corridor, but has already earned a more fitting nickname: a hole to hell.

Everywhere, there are people. People moving in groups, pairs and alone; people young and old, mothers and fathers with baby carriages, people speaking into their cell phones, people carrying shopping bags, well-dressed people and shabby looking people, schoolchildren, people selling things on the street. And everywhere there are cars containing yet more people, _happy angry hoping aspiring lost hungry stressed naïve broken stupid tired celebrating_ and he is already feeling overwhelmed when he thinks of New York and of innumerably bigger crowds that were there when the attack struck, and they started to run around headless in their panic like insects, like a swarm of moths fluttering helplessly in the gale.   

He tries to focus on something else, but the only thing he can find is a crossed sign with a human figure leaning halfway into an open window. It is supposed to be a warning against such an action, but actually makes the figure look like some bizarre creature frozen mid-flight, and it doesn’t help in the least.      

Instead, Loki digs the heels of his palms into his eyes trying to block it all, as the tram passes between a row of Vietnamese and Arabian shops on the right side and the Holy Trinity baroque church on the left and the church bells start to ring. At the same time, all the sirens in the town go off.  
  
It is, after all, the first Wednesday of this month.  
  
Loki lets go of his hands, with his eyes still closed, and listens.   
  
 _Police bells and church sirens,_ he thinks of a line from half-remembered Danish song, and then for a blissful moment he focuses only on the sound and on the warmth of sunlight on his eyelids.  
  
“Siren test concluded. I repeat, siren test concluded,” a mechanical voice says, and Loki opens his eyes again. The tram is now going steeply uphill and he has missed his stop. He should get off the next one and walk back. But if he stays, he can as well go _there._

Loki doesn’t get off at the next stop.

  
…

  
The tram now reaches a part of town Steve hasn’t been to yet, but he doesn’t look outside much. He stands in the front of the second car, and keeps his gaze focused on Loki, who is sitting in the middle of the first car, motionlessly staring out of the window.  
  
This part of town seems to be less busy, as there is only one person getting on the tram on the next stop, a bulky man in his forties in a blue jeans jacket, who enters Loki’s car. He pulls out a badge from his pocket and starts to show it to random passengers, who in turn show him their tickets or cards. The controller misses Loki, instead turning to a respectably looking elderly woman behind him.     
  
He shows the woman his badge. She doesn’t show him anything in return and starts to tell him something in an agitated manner. The controller talks back, they argue. From Steve’s position in the second car it feels as though he is watching a silent movie. This movie turns into a grotesque when the woman pushes the controller at his chest and darts towards the door, just as the tram slows down at the next stop. The door opens and she flees with the controller right on her track.  
  
They are running to the direction the tram came from. Despite having at least fifteen years on her pursuer, the old woman is surprisingly fast and the heavily breathing man struggles to keep up with her.   
  
Steve turns back to watch the strange pair diminishing at the distance, and he is reminded of Achilles pursuing the Tortoise, who, despite moving twice the speed of the Tortoise, can never reach it.    

He notices he must have knocked down his backpack he put on the ground by accident, so he bends to set it back to upright position. As he does that, he thinks of the sketchbook inside and of a picture of Loki sitting on the bench in the public garden he managed to draw before.    
  
Loki gets off at the next stop and Steve is right behind him. He plans to follow Loki all the way to his home, and confront him. He doesn’t know yet what he’s going to tell Loki in this confrontation, but he trusts his ability to improvise.  
  
However, as Steve takes in the stalls with bouquets and wreaths and candles, the high white walls and iron-wrought gate, into which Loki disappears, his ability to improvise is put under a test. Because this is not anyone’s home, but a cemetery.  
  
The cemetery is full of yellowed alder trees and old women carrying jugs of water and weeding pansies on the graves. They pass a section of small graves, some of them with toys arranged in front of the headstones; the children’s cemetery. Loki turns left and then right, and then he stops in front of one thumb stone. Steve doesn’t go closer, instead stepping into the shadow of one alder tree.  
  
Loki is standing there for long time with his head hung down, immovable, until he abruptly leaves.  
  
Steve’s ability to improvise momentarily deserts him and he just stands there dumfounded, leaning against the tree, because with the sight of Loki's red-rimmed eyes nothing makes sense anymore.  

  
…

  
Rachmaninoff purrs as Anna Hoeg pets his black fur. She hasn’t played Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor since she got the phone call from Dr. Kupka. She is watching the television in her living room full of mahogany furniture and Meissen porcelain, stretched on the sofa with Rachmaninoff curled up in front of her. In the armchair on her right side, her daughter Kirsten, tired from a long day at the hospital, fell asleep at what must be an uncomfortable angle, with her head tilted backwards, snoring slightly.  
  
It is dark outside, and Anna’s husband Niels has yet to come home from his alumni get together; she doesn’t expect him for some time. The TV plays a romantic comedy she and her daughter have seen a hundred times, but they both still like it because it helps them relax.  
  
The movie got to the point where the bride throws a bouquet at the row of waiting women, and its movement is artificially slowed down. Anna stares at it, and suddenly she sees a different bouquet, a bouquet of black roses flying down, below her feet clad in black pumps, and the vague feeling she sometimes gets about Eric obtains new, more specific contours, and chill runs down her spine.

The wedding party on the screen grows louder and the moment is lost. She notices a flour moth sitting on a mahogany serving table and kills it with a napkin, wondering since when they had moths.  
  
 _Now, what was it again about Eric?_

  
…

 

It is 6th October, and there is a knock at Loki’s door. He moves his head slightly to the left and thinks he should probably get up and answer the knocking. It must be some of those gas or electric people that come and plague him from time to time when he must pretend that he cares about such things about how much he pays for his electric consumption, as Magdalena will never use the electric kettle again so its reason for existence is no longer justified, and neither is his.

The knock sounds again and he forces himself to get into a sitting position with his feet on the ground. He should better get this, there really was no point stalling as they always came back in the end. When he reaches for his bathrobe, the corner of his eye catches a fast movement of wings outside of his window. It feels so incredibly light that the weight he’s carrying feels crushing in contrast, all the lost and guilt, because he _abandoned_ Magdalena, let her go to New York alone because of his pride, and she never came back. 

Another knock, and Loki forces his mind to go blank as he opens the heavy door. It is Steve Rogers.

 _Oh._  

“Do you have any urgent questions on Norse mythology?” is the first thing that leaves Loki’s mouth, with a slight ironic emphasis on the word _urgent._

“In fact, I do,” Steve Rogers answers calmly. “May I come in?”

Loki lets him in through the narrow hall that also serves as a kitchen, into the dining room where he cleans a pile of papers and books from one chair so Steve can sit down, and suddenly he is very conscious of the state of his apartment, which is frankly horrendous, and about the threadbare black bathrobe he’s wearing that makes him feel naked.   

“So,” Steve Rogers begins, looking Loki square into the eye, and Loki feels that those cobalt blue eyes can see things about him that are hidden even from himself, “What can you tell me about Loki?”

 

…

 

Loki’s eyes open wide in confusion mixed with a hint of some other emotion that more than anything looks like terror. Then something shifts and all expression is wiped in an instant, leaving only pleasant inquiry in its wake, which makes Steve uneasy, because it doesn’t fit with the haggardness of the other man’s face at all. The combination of hollow eyes, protruding cheekbones and fake polite smile is unsettling to the point that Steve begins to question his decision to follow Loki here, without informing anybody. But he decided to test a theory, and since he’s here, there is nothing to do but to follow through his plan. 

“You must excuse me, I‘m a terrible host,” Loki says smoothly instead of answering his question while he takes a couple of steps away from Steve, “I haven’t been feeling well recently so I didn’t clean this place in ages. Let me at least offer you something to drink. Coffee?”

“Tea, if you’ve got some,” Steve forces himself to say and something in Loki’s face twitches, before the mask slips back. He leaves Steve, who has the time to properly look around himself now. The place surely is a mess, with layers of dust lying on the bookshelf next to the table, papers scattered on the floor and a stale-smelling air of a place where the windows remain closed all the time. The walls are littered with strange little dark stains. Steve briefly wonders what caused them until he sees a flour moth flying by, and soon another. His uneasiness deepens and his throat starts to feel parched.

He is happy to accept a steaming mug of tea placed in front of him, taking a careful sip so he doesn’t burn his lips. The tea tastes of chamomile and doesn’t fit Loki at all. Loki doesn’t bring himself anything, just sits on the black lacquered chair which doesn’t match to the other two plain brown chairs at the table. Loki steeples his fingers and doesn’t look at Steve. 

Steve is about to repeat his question, when Loki speaks:

“That one too is numbered among the Æsir whom some call the slanderer of the Æsirand originator of deceptions and a stain of the Æsir and humans. His name is Loki or Lopt, son of the giant Farbauti. Laufey or Nál is his mother and his brothers are Byleistr and Helblindi. Loki is fair and handsome in appearance, bad of mind, very changeable in his ways. He had that form of wisdom beyond other men, which is called cunning, and he uses tricks in everything. He constantly brought the Æsir into great difficulty, and often rescued them with deceits.”

Steve is immediately brought back to the lecture room because it feels like Loki isn’t speaking to him at all. His voice is resolute and impersonal and easy to get lost in. His eyes are fixed to some point behind Steve, past the open door into hall, past the half-empty coat-rack, past the dreadful wallpaper, past this mouldy oppressive house, past all things tangible.  

Loki goes on and tells Steve about various myths starring Loki, like a lighthearted story of Thor and Loki dressing as a bride and her maid so that they could retrieve Thor’s hammer, or the one presenting Loki in a surprisingly favorable light, where he transforms into a mare and gives birth to eight-legged horse named Sleipnir, all to stop a Jotun builder from taking the sun and the moon, or the dark one where he is responsible for the death for his step-brother Baldr by advising his enemy to shoot Baldr with mistletoe, the only thing that can harm him. For that, he is punished by being bound to a cliff by his own son’s entrails, until the end of days. 

Then, without warning, he is not speaking English any longer. Steve can’t really tell where one word ends and another one begins, but it doesn’t matter. He feels goose bumps rise on his skin, even here in this dingy apartment with chamomile tea slowly growing lukewarm in his hands, or especially here.

“What does it mean?” he finally dares to ask after a long beat of silence that followed.

“A heart ate Loki, in the embers it lay,

And half-cooked found he the woman's heart;

With child from the woman Loki soon was,

And thence among men came the monsters all

The sea, storm-driven, seeks heaven itself,

O'er the earth it flows, the air grows sterile;

Then follow the snows and the furious winds,

For the gods are doomed, and the end is death.”

When Loki recites, Steve feels a shiver run down his spine. Outside of the window, dusk has begun to settle, and the temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees. 

“What else do you wish to know?” Loki asks with a voice devoid of all inflection, but this time he is finally looking into Steve’s eyes.

“What does he look like?” Steve asks without hesitation.

“ _Fair and handsome_ is not enough a description for you?” Loki cocks one eyebrow up. “Besides, as we are talking about a mythological figure, I do not find looks at all relevant.”

“I was just wondering if the description fits the Loki who invaded Earth this spring,” Steve replies with a forced nonchalance. 

Loki’s face is suddenly no longer a mask; it contorts as if in pain and then assumes an expression of extreme distaste.

“That one? I don’t think he has anything in common with our mythology, except for doing some half-hearted reading on the subject.”

“What do you mean by that?” Steve asks, genuinely surprised.

“Let me elaborate,” Loki says with an indignant snort, “I am inclined to believe that this alien imposter pretended to be Loki in a misguided notion of exploiting human natural proclivity to religion – a dated one, though, and one that could have been more successful if he had chosen to impersonate Jesus or Prophet Mohammed. He probably expected that people would kneel in front of him on sight and worship him unconditionally. But this imposter chose a wrong deity.”

Steve stops his jaw from hanging open from the sheer absurdity of this situation. 

“How so?” he manages to ask.   

“According to a wide-spread scholarly opinion, Loki is not even a proper god. He is more like a notion of “impulsive intelligence” as they call it, a concept of mischief that has somehow got anthropomorphized; that is why there are no mentions of worshippers or followers of Loki in the old Scandinavian chronicles,” Loki explains calmly.       

It all made a lot of sense, Steve realizes. It is entirely plausible: Loki as a concept or thought, not as a god, and even less as the man across the table with white and green striped cloth on it, that painfully beautiful man with haunted eyes and lecturer’s diction.

Unfortunately, Steve saw this very man proclaim himself a Norse deity and destroy half of New York City. That’s why he asks the next question, even though some part of him wishes he could just stay there sitting at the table in this moth-stained apartment and listen to the velvety voice speak a language he can’t understand, but it nonetheless brings to him the chill of winter nights and howling of heart-devouring monsters who dwell in them, listen to this voice until the end of days.           

But Steve knows that’s impossible, and that’s why he asks:

“Have you actually seen him? I mean, during the attack?”

Loki appears puzzled by his question.

“I must have, I suppose, but-“ he stops abruptly and hesitates for a moment, while Steve silently urges him to go on. Eventually Loki takes a deep breath and continues:

“I’ve recently suffered a head injury, and my memory cannot be trusted. I don’t recall what he looked like; I must admit that I had little desire to refresh my memory in this respect. Even though, this being my area of expertise, you might find this reluctance… _odd_.” 

 _What an understatement,_ Steve thinks as he seeks out Loki’s eyes, but they are once again glued to some point at the distance. Realizing that no questions seem to bring them anywhere, Steve bends to his side and opens his backpack. As he searches inside for his sketchbook, he feels he is being watched. He peeks at Loki whose expression is caught somewhere between curiosity and mistrust. 

“I’d like to show you something,” he says, unconsciously trying to make his voice sound as unthreatening as possible. Loki doesn’t say anything in return, and Steve takes his silence for assent, passing him his sketchbook. 

“Excuse me,” Loki says and rises from his chair. Steve is momentarily perplexed until he hears a soft click and the room is flooded with warm yellow light that softens the edges of furniture and lines in Loki’s face. Then he takes the sketchbook, gingerly as though he might break it – or vice versa.

He starts from the first page, methodically going through Steve’s drawings of New York and then Prague without a single word. He reaches a very haste sketch Steve made four days ago, of the red-and-white hot air balloon floating above the river, looking at Steve with an unreadable expression.  

“You admire things of rare beauty,” he states.

Steve shrugs his shoulders.

“It’s in human nature, I guess.”  

“Perhaps,” Loki owns and turns to the last used page. And freezes.

 

…

 

The last page shows him the likeness of himself sitting in the park with a book in his hands, as he did on that day. But the figure in the picture is wearing a black, golden and green armor and a golden helmet with horns. He tries to understand why this picture which must surely be a joke makes his head feel like it’s bursting open, but it’s hard, because suddenly there are myriads of images pushing at the inner sides of his eyelids, first just flashes of colors, yellow, green, silver and red, and then there are places and faces, voices and smells. The contents of a person’s memory. 

These memories don’t belong to Eric Lund at all, but to Loki, a Norse god perhaps, or a concept and a thought, and most of all now a bundle of raw feelings and _guilt._

His hands are groping around, trying to take a hold of something, but his fingers just slip on all those brown smudges, _I’ve killed hundreds of thousands Eric and Magdalena I’ve killed her with my own hands._ The smell of moldering roses is stronger than ever.

He is aware of saying something but doesn’t hear his own voice over the buzzing in his ears. The impressions keep coming like tidal waves and he’s drowning in them, until all goes black and quiet. The last thing he feels before his consciousness slip sway is a strong pair of arms taking hold of him.

 

…

 

The effect is instantaneous and frightening. Loki rises from his chair and takes a couple steps back, looking as though he saw a ghost, shaking violently. He appears to go in some sort of trance, with his hands groping around him as if searching for something, his fingers tracing the stains on the wall. 

From his earlier observations, Steve assumed that Loki somehow lost awareness of who he really was and believed himself to be Eric Lund, lecturer of Danish literature and Norse mythology who apparently killed himself by jumping off a bridge at the beginning of July, after suffering from a long bout of depression caused by losing his fiancée in Loki’s attack. 

Steve can only guess at what kind of Asgardian sorcery made him assume the life of a man who killed himself because of what Loki did to him, and to what ends – was it a punishment, lesson in humanity of sorts?

Loki’s lips start to move and Steve moves closer to catch what he’s saying. 

“…there actually _were_ roses,” Steve hears Loki whisper before his eyes roll white.

Steve has no idea what is going to happen next. What is Loki going to do with his regained memory, or what is he going to do with Loki. But as he gently lowers the other man on the forest green sofa next to the window, he realizes that Loki was right.

Steve Rogers is an admirer of rare beauty. Once he finds it, he can never let it go.

 

**The End**

 

**Author's Note:**

> For quotations of verses from Poetic Edda, I’ve used two translations I consider the most beautiful, by J. E. Chrisholm (From the Eddas: the Keys to the Mysteries of the North, 2005) and by H. A. Bellows (The Poetic Edda, 1936).  
> More specifically, the opening verses: “Shut up you wretched wight!/ My hammer of might,/ Mjolnir will take away your talk. /I will cast you into the east /where no one will ever see you again!” are from Chrisholm’s translation of the poem Lokasenna (Flyting of Loki), and Thor addresses them to Loki.  
> I shall go into Ægir’s hall,/ for the feast I fain would see/ bale and hatred I bring to the Gods,/ and their mead with venom I mix: these verses are spoken by Loki in the same poem, this time in Bellows’ translation.  
> Finally the passage about Loki eating heart and giving birth to monsters comes from Bellows’ version of the poem Hyndluljoth or more precisely a fragment called „short Voluspo“. I made a minor change in form of replacing the name “Lopt” with Loki for consistence.  
> Loki’s monologue about himself starting with “That one too is numbered among the Æsir…“ comes from Snori Sturluson’s Prose Edda (1223), and was translated by Stefanie von Schnurbein.


End file.
